01 February 2018

US continues trafficking in deceit with Hezbollah ‘narcoterrorism’ unit

Middle East Eye

Last month, the US Justice Department announced the launch of an exciting new project: the Hezbollah Financing and Narcoterrorism Team (HFNT), which will continue the US effort to paint the Lebanese group as the epitome of global evil and criminalise its supporters.
The announcement comes on the heels of a December 2017 three-part Politico "expose", tantalisingly headlined: "The secret backstory of how Obama let Hezbollah off the hook."
Who knew that the president who dropped 26,172 bombs on seven Muslim-majority countries in a single year - while wildly increasing US military aid to Israel - was an old softie on the Party of God?
Providing helpful ammunition to the current administration of Donald Trump, the Politico article highlights allegations that Obama recklessly ignored Hezbollah's "narcoterrorist" activity in order to appease Iran in the run-up to the beloved nuclear deal.
Never mind that drug trafficking is fundamentally at odds with Hezbollah's religious orientation; reality has never been a prerequisite to manufacturing threats.
According to Fox News, the HFNT will "begin its work by reviewing investigations stemming from Project Cassandra" - a decade-long operation overseen by the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). 
The existence of Project Cassandra, Politico notes, was first revealed in 2016 along with the operation's target: "the drug- and weapons-trafficking unit known as Hezbollah's Business Affairs Component". (Hezbollah, for its part, has never mentioned a Business Affairs Component, but US law enforcement agencies clearly know best.) READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.